the role of experience in writing

The role of experience in writing is a large topic worth a long essay, but I’m not going to give a lengthy discussion of it here. I’ll just make a quick observation.

Schopenhauer says somewhere that you should never turn down a social invitation for the sake of reading. His point was that your own original thoughts are more stimulated by getting out of the house and becoming involved in a real situation than by reading someone else’s thoughts as set down in a book.

And he has some truth on his side here. Every new situation in which we become involved, whether it be “social” in the narrow sense or not, throws a few minor or major surprises our way. There is something slightly distinct about the emotional tonality with which we react to every new person, place, or thing.

And this suggests the already fairly obvious point that building up a stock of experiences is the best stimulus to your writing. It is quite conceivable in some cases that writing nothing at all for 2 or 3 years might be exactly what someone needs to do for the purposes of better work later on. (But not if you’re a graduate student, that’s all.)

I often find myself thinking things like this: “This is the first time I’ve ever written a philosophical essay having seen Bulgaria rather than never having seen it.” This may sound silly, but it shouldn’t. Bulgaria, like any other place, did leave certain distinct impressions on me that I would never have had if I had never gone, or if I had gone for the first time at a younger or older age (I went for the first and so far only time in 2006).

And why should it not be the case that whatever small pieces of wisdom I picked up just from soaking in the atmosphere of Sofia (nice place, by the way) would leave some faint trace on my philosophical work? Yes, it would probably be something so minor that no reader would ever notice, but that’s not the point. The point is that such experiences can keep you fresh and interested when it comes to your work.

This is on my mind because today I booked a very interesting trip for the next Eid in November. Perhaps this time I’ll say nothing about where I’m going until after returning and posting some photos on this blog; or maybe I’ll be in the mood to talk about it soon. But it’s the sort of place where one could definitely say, with a straight face, “this is the first time I’ve tried to write a philosophical essay since visiting X and seeing Y.”